Damien’s POV
We worked for another hour after she said it. The timeline. Brenn's testimony logistics. The scholar authentication request that needed to go through council channels by Thursday. All of it moving, all of it building toward something that would hold. She was efficient and precise and I tracked her reasoning the way I'd been tracking it for two nights now — staying one step behind deliberately, because one step behind was where I could see the full shape of what she was doing.
At eight forty-three she set her pen down. Not because we'd finished. Because she'd found the seam in the second procedural window and needed a moment to think it through before she committed it to the timeline. I'd learned to recognize when she was doing this — the specific quality of her stillness whe
